Designing Supportive Dashboards for Crisis Response to Protect Vulnerable Populations: A Qualitative Study

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed both direct and collateral health impacts especially on vulnerable populations, underscoring the need for more targeted and equitable crisis response strategies. Health-related dashboards could support better information sharing, research, and care delivery, but current dashboards often fail to address the needs of vulnerable groups. This study aimed to assess expert perspectives on key aspects of a new crisis response health dashboard to protect vulnerable populations intended to be used by medical professionals and affected persons.

A prospective, participatory workshop was conducted with a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the COLLPAN consortium (n = 20). The workshop employed the 6-3-5 method developed by Bernd Rohrbach. Data were collected through semi-structured textual responses, transcribed, and analyzed using a thematic analysis with MAXQDA (version 24.5.0).

The envisioned dashboard targets a wide range of users-including patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, policymakers-with particular attention to those with limited digital literacy. Core functionalities include data visualization, management, analysis, networking, and administrative support, enhanced by multilingual, app-based, and artificial intelligence assisted features. The proposed content encompasses resource availability, epidemiological indicators, disease burden with regional and international comparisons, and the inclusion of individual risk profiling. Data sources include health, administrative, socioeconomic, and demographic datasets. The limitations identified relate to technical, regulatory, user-centered, definitional, and resource-based challenges.

The study highlights the importance of inclusive, user-centered design in the development of health-related dashboards, particularly to address the needs of vulnerable populations. By involving diverse stakeholders at an early stage and strengthening the technical foundations, digital solutions have the potential to reduce health inequalities rather than reinforcing them.